ABRAHAM LINCOLN

BY

JOHN T. MORSE, JR.

IN TWO VOLUMES

VOL. I.

1899

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

The fifth and final group of biographies in theAmerican Statesmen series deals with the Periodof the Civil War. The statesmen whose lives areincluded in this group are Abraham Lincoln,William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, CharlesFrancis Adams, Charles Sumner, and ThaddeusStevens.

The years of the civil war constitute an episoderather than an independent period in our nationalhistory. They were interposed between two eras;and if they are to be integrally connected witheither of these, it is with the era which precededthem rather than with that which followed them.They were the result, the closing act, of the quarter-centuryof the anti-slavery crusade. Whenthe war came to an end the country made a newstart under new conditions. Yet it is proper totreat the years of the war by themselves, not onlybecause they were filled by the clearly defined andabnormal condition of warfare, but because a distinctgroup of statesmen is peculiarly associatedwith them. The men whose lives are found in vithis group had been struggling for recognitionduring the years which preceded the war, but theyonly arrived at the control of affairs after thatevent became assured. Soon after its close theirwork was substantially done.

For a long while before hostilities actually brokeout, it was evident that a civil war would be anatural result of the antagonism between theSouth and the North; it is now obvious enoughthat it was more than a natural, that it was anabsolutely inevitable result. Looking backward,we can only be surprised that wise men ever fanciedthat a conflict could be avoided; but, asusual, the strenuous hope became father to an anxiousbelief. Abraham Lincoln, in the first yearwhen he gave indication of his political clear-sightedness,said truly that the country could not continuehalf slave and half free. That truth involvedwar. There was no other possible way to settlethe question between the two halves; talk of freeingthe slaves by purchase, or by gradual emancipationand colonization, was simple nonsense,the forlorn schemes of men who would fain haveescaped out of the track of inexorable destiny.Yet the vast majority of the nation, appalled atthe vision of the great fact which lay right athwarttheir road, was obstinate in the delusive expectationof flanking it, as though there were side paths v

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American Statesmen

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